


The End

by Spiral_Patterns (apparition)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Season/Series 15, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon Universe, M/M, Season/Series 14 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-26 21:35:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20937116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparition/pseuds/Spiral_Patterns
Summary: Castiel has been taken by the Shadow, and the world is full of ghosts. Sam and Dean are doing their best, but it's up to Jack to put everything, and everyone, back together.





	1. The End

It was the end. They’d lost. 

_ He’d _ lost. Jack had failed his family, his friends. The world. The least he could do now was bear witness as it all ended. 

He leant into the doorframe, watching as a silvery figure crossed the bunker floor and vanished into a wall. It was a regular occurrence these days, even down here where the bunker’s warding shielded them from most of the horror of what was going on above. Lost souls, thinning further and further, growing madder and madder, ripped out of Heaven and Hell and flung into the wind. 

This world now belonged to the ghosts, though it was still haunted by the living. The terrible wound gouged into the fabric of existence was slowly bleeding it dry. There were no more souls being made. There were no more souls being saved. There were only wandering, desolate, fading memories of what had been. It was only a matter of time, eons or decades, before life itself would unravel under the weight of that profound loss. Maybe a lifetime for Sam and Dean. Whatever that meant, now.

It would be much more than that for Jack, his nephilim grace likely to be the last thing in Creation when this was done. Even the monsters would cease to be one day, though they’d be the last to go. But Jack would still be there, long after that last, tiny remaining sliver of his human soul had unravelled, drawn into the oblivion of a world without an afterlife. 

The ghost appeared a second time, drifting over to hover above the books Sam had left sprawled over the long table. A familiar ghost. 

“Kevin?” Jack called to it, uncertain. 

It didn’t respond. They never did. This one’s soul had eroded quite a long way, and the vague features of its face shifted and morphed, not quite settled on the shape of what it used to be. The ghosts that were this far gone never showed any real recognition, or real emotion. Maybe that was best, Jack thought. Best that they didn’t really remember. Kevin wouldn’t have wanted to see this. 

This was a future no prophet could have forseen, and with Heaven destroyed, and the conduit of their connection to the divine ripped away, there would be no more of them made to witness the rest of Creation fall too. 

The slam of a door startled Jack from his thoughts. He glanced up to see Sam enter the room, and stop dead before the silver mist that might have been Kevin. Briefly, Sam looked at Jack, mouth open like he wanted to say something. 

He didn’t. Just paused there, all bloodshot eyes and useless tension, before waving a hand through the silver mist, and dissipating the restless spirit. Looking away, Sam slumped his long frame back down to bury himself in those books. 

Jack glanced across to the other end of the table, where a bulky machine sat. An ancient relic of the fifties, they’d dug it out from some deep Men of Letters cache in the early days of the End. Jack didn’t understand how, but the brass knobs and fine lettering could be arranged in a way to let some of those lost souls speak. It had been a spark of excitement at first, that they could communicate with these fading spirits. 

But what they had to say was awful. That the end was coming. That there was nowhere, nothing. Jack knew better than to suggest they try the machine, even if that was Kevin. The dead did not have answers, and they clung on to their terror, the last emotion they knew before they finally unravelled. 

Jack slunk back, through the doorway, and into the corridor. Sam and Dean were unravelling too, as listless and lifeless as those spirits. Though the ghosts were peaceful at least, in their displacement. Sam no longer slept. Sam had realised what the ghosts had meant for the world straight away.

Madness.

They’d slowly drive the living insane with the inevitability of their message, and all the while, the monsters would grow more twisted, stronger with the release of all that spiritual power across the Earth. Eventually the human race would fade, as fewer and fewer souls came about. They were finite now, with the heart of Heaven ripped away. Sam had read all about it, trapped in an endless cycle of fruitless research that would send him spinning off into incoherent anxiety if it were ever interrupted.

So Jack left him alone. Padded carefully along the corridor to his room, where he would be as much of a ghost as the rest of them. Sam needed his space. 

And Dean.

Dean was broken. When the ghosts came, even the ones he recognised, he looked straight through them. Even at the start, he’d refused to find a way to reach out, to talk to them. He’d just shut down, withdrawn - he barely spoke a word to Sam, and none at all to Jack. Dean had become hard, cold, functional, and though he was still hunting at least, churning through werewolves, ghouls and vamps, it was a routine sort of slaughter. A way to feel something, Jack reasoned. Or to give him something to kill, in lieu of the true villain.

That was Jack, though Dean still brought him along on hunts. Jack didn’t understand why - after all, Dean was right, it was his fault. But there he was, at Dean’s side while they waded neck-deep through literal hordes of monsters, stronger than any they’d faced before. For some reason, Dean wanted him there. 

The only real clue as to why was one time, when Dean muttered something about not wasting it, whatever that meant. After that, though, he stayed silent while Jack atomised the monsters Dean missed.

Occasionally, Jack needed to resurrect him. Dean missed more and more, these days - caught by things he should have easily fended off. They never discussed it, and Jack didn’t push it. Dean knew why the world was dying. He knew Jack was the cause of it. The resurrections were the only thing he could offer against that grim reality. He never told Dean when he’d done it either.

It was very likely Dean would ask him to stop.

Even in the decaying half-life of his human soul, even with the bare remnants of feeling still left to him in that sliver, Jack could hardly bear the pain. They were still there with him in that bunker, the two of them, but he was entirely alone, in a dying, mad world, full of monsters.

And he was one of them. 


	2. Castiel

Castiel was gone. 

Alone in his room, Jack reached out to touch an empty bottle he’d left sitting on the table by the door. A beer bottle, the label peeled half-off. It was smooth, real. Something to cling onto. 

The angel had been holding it when he’d been taken. Taken in that quiet, beautiful moment when they’d all believed they had won, when they were all finally at peace. Taken so easily, his bargain with the Shadow come due. 

A bargain that had saved Jack from a cold, endless oblivion. A selfless bargain the wayward angel had made without even considering whether Jack would be worth it. Now that he’d seen Castiel truly smile, Jack couldn’t imagine the warmth of it being forever lost in that darkness.

He tried on a smile himself, trying to remember how to feel things. The reflection of his face in the bottle was contorted, the curve of his lips looking nothing the smile he’d remembered on Castiel. Gone now. Lost, like the rest of him. 

Jack was almost lost, too. Briefly, he’d been a Winchester. He’d been something good. But that was gone now.

From the start, he’d been destined to devour. To end. He knew what had been said, before his birth, by the demon that guarded his mother. “Every sad, weak human, every tight-ass angel. Every snivelling demon. They’ll all be consumed.”

It was something of a horrifying prophecy. And here he was, bringing it about. Slowly, inevitably.

So he kept his distance from the Winchesters, not wanting to devour them too. Only appearing when needed. Castiel would have wanted him to protect them, and he’d tried, but there was only so much he could do when they’d stopped trying to protect themselves.

Jack picked up the bottle, feeling the weight of it in his hand. There had to be a win, a way for his family to be what they were. To rebuild Heaven. To rehouse all those souls. To give the human race a future, again.

To bring back Castiel.

Jack could feel him still - the thread where they were still tied together. It was in that beer bottle, it was in the back of his thoughts, always. He’d tried to tell Dean, to offer some sort of comfort. That they were connected, through that oblivion. He just had to find a way through.

Dean didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want the hope. Jack thought the hunter might have lost his soul too, back on that dusty roadside. But Sam listened, remembering how he’d called Castiel back before. He’d done it once. He could do it again. 

Sam had faith in him, still. In that connection. In Jack’s power.

And he was powerful. 

The day Jack conquered Heaven, and tied himself to it, so that it was anchored and powered by his grace, he’d finally _ felt _ that power. As brief a victory as it was, that was how they’d won. Not sanctioned at all by those still in Heaven - horrified by the necessity of what amounted to destroying their last bond with God, the angels were _ not _ on board with the plan. 

So Sam and Dean had driven across half the country to meet Castiel, who had let the remaining angels chase after a fake angel tablet, while Jack broke into Heaven.

It hadn’t been easy. Heaven had been made to be tied to God, after all, and Jack was an outsider. Cutting through that had been difficult. It was clearly designed to prevent even an archangel from doing what he was trying to do. Likely designed to prevent his father, specifically.

He was more than his father though. He was the sum of all of the Winchester’s courage, of Castiel’s determination. Of his mother’s strength.

He was enough. He had to be.

The effort of breaking something so fundamental almost ended him. But he fought through every safeguard and persevered, just like they’d always done. Somewhere in the midst of breaking the last tie, he glimpsed part of his grandfather, a distant light that retreated as he caught and bound the last pieces of Heaven to himself.

And then Heaven was his. His. Protected. Connected to a source of power once more.

Saved.

He flew back to Earth, to that fateful dusty road, to join them in the Impala. Next to him on the back seat, Castiel greeted him, half-exhausted with the decoy bit of stone in his lap. The worn out angel smiled, and said he was proud of him.

For one, brief moment, the world was safe. The other Michael was dead. The angels had their home back. Hell was still reeling from Crowley’s absence.

For the first time, in so many years, they only had the monsters to worry about.

They'd done it. They'd succeeded. They'd won.

Castiel had wanted that win, for them all. To be free of the axe that had hung over their heads for so long. For them to simply be free - to no longer need to make those terrible choices, for the world to go on without needing saving.

With the Impala parked by the side of the road, they celebrated. All four of them leant up against the warmth of the car’s wide, black hood, and laughing at the absurdity of their own freedom. That the angels would finally stay home and leave the world alone. That the demons were so terrified of Jack (and of Sam) that they didn't dare walk the Earth, either.

That Jack was now their defacto God.

Sam asked Jack if he was alright, and he was. He had the three of them there; of course he was.

And in the hazy stillness of the warm summer afternoon, Dean asked Castiel if he’d ever return home.

Castiel replied that he was already there - in the bunker, in the Impala. "Wherever you are," he said, earnest as ever. Dean just nodded, smiling in the privacy of his eyes, and offered him a beer.

It hadn’t been a moment really, Jack was sure of that. But Castiel had changed, as he’d taken a sip, the smile he wore lighting him up like the simple drink had been pure angel grace.

And that was when it had come. As it had promised.

The noise the bottle made as it shattered against the floor was swallowed by the silence of the bunker. Sam was at his door in seconds, still capable of alarm, but on seeing the smashed glass, he sighed. 

“Jack….” he trailed off. “Do you want to talk?” 

But Jack had done that already. With a deliberate snap, the bottle was back on the table, whole again. Sam looked hard at it for a moment, and then at Jack. 

“We’ll find him, Jack. Okay? You’re basically God, there has to be a way.” Sam tried for a smile, but it was on the same level as Jack’s. Neither of them knew how to do it anymore. 

Jack didn’t reply to that, and eventually Sam left, the tension at being away from his books apparent. The bottle sat on the table, reflecting the light-bulb on the ceiling. 

“_Castiel _,” Jack whispered at it, urgently. But there was no answer there, either. 


End file.
